Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner has a wonderfully diverse geographic background, and it is worth spending a moment describing it before discussing his last novel, Crossing to Safety. Born in Iowa, he spent most of his early life in the western United States, including Montana, North Dakota, and Utah. Though not Mormon, he became familiar with the faith and its history, and would later write several nonfiction books about LDS-related subjects. After graduating from the University of Utah, he married his wife Mary; their marriage would last 59 years until his death. He completed graduate studies at the University of Iowa, taught at the University of Wisconsin, and published his first novel. The novel's success landed him a job teaching writing at Harvard, after which he was invited to head the creative writing program at Stanford, which he did for a quarter-century. He also lived part-time in Vermont, where many of his novels were set.

Having grown up in Utah before heading east for school myself, I was rather drawn to this biography. All the better then that Crossing to Safety incorporates so many autobiographical elements. The narrator of the book is Larry Morgan, a novelist who has returned with his wife Sally to the Vermont estate of their friends Charity and Sid Lang. The couples had met decades earlier when Larry and Sid were young, untenured lecturers at the University of Wisconsin, and the book is largely filled with Larry's meditations and memories about this lifelong friendship. Like Stegner, Larry has an unconventional background for a professor at a Midwestern school in the 1930s; coming from Berkeley after studying at the University of New Mexico as an undergraduate:

I was a single cork to plug a single hole for a single season. My colleagues, instructors of one or two years' standing, were locked in and hanging on. They made a tight in-group, and their conversation tended to include me only cautiously and with suspicion. They all seemed to have come from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.

Including Sid and Charity Lang. Charity, the daughter of a Harvard professor and niece of the former ambassador to France ("Roosevelt replaced him--fired him, I guess you'd have to say.") and a graduate of Smith, she met her husband during his graduate studies at Harvard. The Langs evidently come from money, while in the lingering depths of the Depression the Morgans are sharing a small basement apartment where "some bricks and boards" serve as a bookcase. Despite the odd couple(s) element at play, the Morgans and Langs hit it off immediately:

Coming from meagerness and low expectations, we felt their friendship as freezing travelers feel a dry room and a fire. Crowded in, rubbing our hands with satisfaction, and were never the same thereafter. Thought better of ourselves, thought better of the world.

The women find their pregnancies are nearly in sync, and Sid finds in Larry a confidante who encourages his creativity. The book travels forward through the years of their friendships, occasionally sliding back to the Morgan's present return to Vermont, occasionally traveling deeper into the past, such as Sid's first visit to the Lang estate (and his first encounter with Charity's mother, Aunt Emily, the forceful head of the Lang matriarchy). And that, more or less, is it. As one of the characters asks, "How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?" Stegner has taken on the challenge of making art out of the usual, the normal, the common:

Since this story is about friendship, drama expects friendship to be overturned. Something, the novelist in me whispers, is going to break up our cozy foursome... Well, too bad for drama. Nothing of the sort is going to happen.

And yet the book is compelling nonetheless; it warms the heart, it breaks it. It is among literature's most authentic portrayals of friendship. And remember that this is a friendship of married couples. Thus it is also a novel about two long marriages, the different ways these marriages were tested, and how they evolved and endured in sometimes disparate fashion. I won't go into details about this, since it is a major part of how the story develops, but Stegner hints early on about tension in the Lang's marriage. Having just learned that one of his own stories will be published in The Atlantic, Larry challenges Sid for focusing on scholarly writing rather than his beloved poetry:

"Why is it so important to be safe?"

He must hear something scornful in my voice, because he looks at me sharply, starts to reply, changes his mind, and says something obviously different from what he has intended. "Charity's family are all professors. She likes being part of a university. She wants us to get promoted, and stay."

"Yeah," I say. "All right, I can see that. But if I were in your shoes I might feel like utilizing the independence I've already got, rather than breaking my neck to get promoted into a kind I might not like so well."

"But you aren't in my shoes," Sid says. It sounds like a mild rebuke, and I shut my mouth.

The way these tensions develop, the effect they have on the Lang-Morgan friendship, and the climactic moments near the book's conclusion are not only riveting but genuine in a way exceedingly rare in modern literature. Stegner does not resort to cliche, unlikely plot twists, or a deus ex machina. He knows academics, he knows writing, he knows friendship, he knows marriage, and he trusts in the power of the basic human experience, his experience. The novel carries this power throughout. A literary delight that I know I will return to many times in the years ahead.

Stegner was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose, published the year he retired from Stanford, and the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird, several years later. If either novel is as good as his last, Stegner will quickly earn a place on my shortlist of favorite authors.